APPENDIX FORE-WORD Note 1."Every living preacher must receive his message in a communication direct from God, and the constant purpose of his life must be to receive it uncorrupted, and to deliver it without addition or subtraction. "It is a truism, but, I think you will all agree, a neglected truism. If in our brief better moments we see it, we constantly are tempted to recede from it. Not without some suspicion of what may be involved in unflinchingly accepting it as true, we are apt to take refuge in modifications, compromises, denials. Flesh shrinks, and the heart cries out. Let some one else go up the rugged steep of the mountain and see Him face to face. Let some one else stand awestruck in the passing of the Almighty. I will do some humbler task. Let me read the lessons, or let me recite the creed, or let me be a priest, clad in the robes of office which are a discharge from personal fitness. On many grounds and in many ways we disclaim our calling. The truth remains as a truism, but we dare not grasp it ourselves. The world notices our disclaimer, and accepts us on the level of our own elected degradation." - ROBERT F. HORTON, Verbum Dei (Macmillan, 1893), p. 17. Note 2."So much of the preaching to-day seems to be preaching to yesterday, or preaching about yesterday. It does not touch as it ought the contemporary life, and grapple with its problems, its duties, its difficulties, its dangers. There is, in consequence, a sense of unreality about it, a foreignness, a far-away-ness; and to men who are of necessity preoccupied with the exigencies of contemporary life, it is not helpful preaching. . . . We should try to make them understand that there is a heaven here in this world, and a hell here in this world, and that those who at present are living in this world are in this heaven or in this hell. And Jesus comes as light, we should try to make them understand, to show them how to get out of the hell which is here, or the hell-fire which is here, into the heaven which is here. . . . We should try to teach men and women to-day that the way in which to use the light of another world shining in Jesus Christ, is not to stand gazing up into heaven and acquiring thus a kind of spiritual myopia, or shortsightedness, which prevents them from seeing clearly the forms of duty immediately about them, but to walk on the earth in the light of that other world which in Jesus Christ so brightly and beautifully appears."-DAVID H. GREER, The Preacher and His Place (Scribners, 1895), pp. 46, 47. "Père Gratry says, 'It is not enough to utter the mysteries of the Spirit, the great mysteries of Christianity, in formulas, true before God, but not understood of the people. The apostle and the prophet are precisely those who have the gift of interpreting these obscure and profound formulas for each man and each age. To translate into the common tongue the mysterious and sacred language to speak the word of God afresh in each age, in accordance with both the novelty of the age and the eternal antiquity of the truth, this is what St. Paul means by interpreting the unknown tongue. But to do this, the first condition is that a man should appreciate the times he lives in. autem tempus quare non probatis."" (John Murray, London, 1890), p. viii. "Hoc - Lux Mundi LECTURE I Note 3. Page 5. -"Je ne crois pas énoncer une vérité bien neuve en affirmant que la Littérature est un de ces éléments, le plus important peut-être, car dans la diminution de plus en plus évidente des influences traditionnelles et locales, le Livre devient le grand initiateur. Il n'est aucun de nous qui, descendu au fond de sa conscience, ne reconnaisse qu'il n'aurait pas été tout à fait le même s'il n'avait pas lu tel ou tel ouvrage; poème ou roman, morceau d'histoire ou de philosophie. À cette minute précise, et tandis que j'écris cette ligne, un adolescent, que je vois, s'est accoudé |